God is Still Sleeping
In 2003 I wrote an essay titled "Your Religion is Wrong," slamming Christianity like a crazier dumber version of Richard Dawkins might do. I was extremely compelled to write it at the time, but it reads like a teenager thinking for himself for the first time, or like an "internet atheist" bravely declaring that the world is not in fact 5,000 years old. Attacking fundamentalism is shooting fish in a barrel, and straw-mannish. In fact Christianity runs the gamut from that caliber of fundamentalistic sci-fi, all the way to Paul Tillich, who is so liberal that he's sometimes called a "Christian Atheist." I think after you arrive at "point Tillich" you basically enjoy a general mystical sense of the Great Beyond while appreciating the character of Jesus in some way (kind to the poor/sick, usually, but also potentially throwing off the yoke of tyranny...democracy AND freedom, to resolve the American political binary in one fell swoop).
Even if you only see Jesus as a positive example and not God per se, it seems like there are many other people in history who were better (kinder, mostly). In fact Jesus sounds like a bit of a type "A" dick at times, with his trashing the moneylender booths and general extremism; religious scholar Reza Aslan paints Jesus as a radical Jewish political leader rather than a spiritual figure, in his 2013 bestseller. Of course these are modern categories and they'd look at you funny in turn of the millennium Palestine if you talked about "spirituality" and "politics"...it's just LIFE, man, and Jesus showed us how to do it right.
I re-read my satanic essay to refresh my memory. One thing that stands out is I seem to want to redo Christianity and avoid trashing the whole enterprise; basically it reads like a furious indictment of the church rather than Jesus or God. It seems like I was still stuck, maybe a little bit, on being a Christian. In 2003 I worked for some fundamentalists ("scripturalists," they corrected) at a some kind of seasonal festival, and I was so horrified I had to go nuts and renounce all of Christendom, something I felt I had failed to do after baptism, confirmation, and a lifetime of apathetic non-belief, semi-belief, or just non-consideration. It was a project that included writing that essay as well as burning my mom's bible on the barbecue grill and then angrily telling her that I *had* to do it when she in fact rather meekly objected. My mom put up with a lot.
But that ire is something I retain, to some extent. I still am wary of pastors/ministers, just as I am wary of political activists and salesmen. I don't like pushy emotive people, or frankly sometimes just people who say words and make faces. This is pretty normal I think but I also think it contributed to rejecting Christianity when I could have instead been looking for a way in.
The first heart of Christianity is the refrain of that 1995 Joan Osborne song: "what if God was one of us?" Jesus Christ brings God closer, and the Christ concept hints at even more ancient Hinduistic ideas of the Self, or universal consciousness, being the same thing as Brahman, or God. This seems like blasphemy to many Jews and Muslims, and frankly to some Christians, for sort of good and obvious reasons. But it might be that there's not a meaningful distinction to being filled with the Holy Spirt and being the Holy Spirit. "The inner Christ" is an extant concept, some googling will soon reveal...yep (about 13,400 results). "We are God" is probably not something more conservative Christians would think or say, but the fact remains that it's laid out in the Bible: the word made flesh.
The second heart of Christianity is salvation. Maybe this is obvious and known to everyone, but it never was to me. But I also think salvation has to do with feeling good in this life rather than guaranteeing life after death while remaining unconsumed by hellfire. I still write to my mom and talk to my mom as though she were around, and in that sense I "believe in heaven," but the process of her death also showed me how absurd notions of afterlife are, as the loss of her personality and consciousness corresponded directly to the loss of her brain function. Some who want heaven for themselves and their loved ones feel (even if they might not "believe," logically, especially when questioned) that in heaven they will be thinking and feeling, much as they are in this life, but neurons will be rotted or burned away, so no thoughts. You can't look around and see puffy clouds because no eyes and no visual cortex.
In order for a classical afterlife experience to take place, there would have to be an alien intervention -- some super-advanced entity would have to, just for shits and giggles perhaps, duplicate the complexity of a human brain in or as some kind of computational system. It's worth noting that the Christians I worked for in 2003 thought of God like this: as a super-powerful alien. "If you want to call God an alien, you can," said one of them. I think that was honest and interesting. Usually, with Christians, there's a certain two-facedness when it comes to conception of God: if you ask an educated Christian "what is God?" they will often default to transcendence/immanence, apophatic theology (God is not x, y, z, etc...what's left?), or "the Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao." However the fact remains that in scripture, and in the way Christians talk about God day to day, God remains very much a spirit person who thinks and feels like a human. So basically Christians tend not to practice what they preach, in terms of personal theology.
There's something interesting in Judaism that I was just reading about that seemed to indicate that although God is talked about and written about as a spirit person, it is in fact wrong to think of "Him" that way, in some ultimate sense, although you can still use the metaphor of "highest being" if convenient (?). I can't find it now. And, I think in Islam too, that's sort of the whole point: to make God greater as an improvement on Judaism and Christianity; Allah can't be a person that wrestles with Jacob or dies on a cross. However, Muslims still talk about God being merciful, just, angry, etc, which are of course human or human-like states of mind.
Cavemen started off with a blank slate of atheism, and then Fundamental Attribution Error (seeing a will-based cause everywhere) moved them to animism, or finding a spirit behind every event and object. Then one of those spirits became dominant, which became monotheism. Then, the conception of that One God grew increasingly sophisticated and broad such that it was more like pantheism. And then, at that point, you're sort of back at square one -- "everything is God" is similar to "there's no God at all." It's a little like the Buddhist/Hindu conflict of "there is no self" vs "the self is everything." Well, if everything is One, what's the difference?
Avoiding distinctions between after-life and real-life and other such minutiae, Christian salvation is an assurance that everything will be all right, and that you don't have to worry or concern yourself; the burden is lifted. I think it's the same thing as enlightenment in Buddhism, realization of the self in Hinduism, and submission in Islam, an equivalency which is controversial and gets denied when I bring it up because, I suppose, many or most Christians are concerned with their afterlife, and that's why "salvation" is important to them, rather than finding a way to be at peace, now. Christians, and everyone else for that matter, don't want to or can't fathom consciousness snuffing out at death, so belief in afterlife is sometimes required to avoid cognitive dissonance. I think this might be different than fears of damnation to Hell, which is another "bad" reason for being Christian, in my opinion.
If you can somehow get the benefits of salvation (relief from mental or existential pain) without having to accept "alternate facts" that contradict scientific revelation, then it would help internal logical consistency in life, which might not in fact matter much; people have all kinds of strange ideas, especially now with flat earth and "space is fake" and so on. It's almost like Westerners, at least, are in an experimental phase in epistemology, as people have realized it doesn't actually matter what you think is real, in most cases. You can still work a job and raise kids if you think space is fake and Trump won the election. "The world is 5,000 years old" used to really bother me, but now I'm fine with it. I think there's a certain mental type (Aspergers as a cognitive style?) that really can't stand it when scientific reality is challenged.
If you look at religion from an evolutionary perspective -- as if you were an alien looking at humanity -- you see that it benefits people while they live their lives, and so it sticks around. We are at a tough spot now, because we have brains that evolved to cope with a physical day-to-day (hunting mammoths) that is very different from modern society and civilization (writing TPS reports). So, we need something -- some kind of calming mental exercise -- to help us through. That's what religion is. Adherents might counter "no, the point is going to heaven," but as I said that would require the intervention of an alien-like higher being redoing your brain elsewhere. This sort of sci-fi sounds silly but it could be true; if you think about the size and age of the universe and then the probability of life on earth-like planets, it seems to increase the likelihood that there is indeed a civilization, or just a lone adventurer/joker, who is doing just that. But faith isn't the same thing as hoping for a winning lotto ticket, I don't think, and furthermore if there is such a creature or creatures out there, they are wondering about God, just as we are.
Another option is the non-existence of the self, proposed by Dharmic religions: mystics feel so connected to the universe that the "self" disappears and death becomes irrelevant; the body dies but so what -- "I" was never really here to begin with. I don't want to come across like another smug educated Westerner who thinks Asian religion is the answer to Abrahamic dogmatism -- the square you should land on after thumbing your nose at church -- but it remains that these Asian religions deal with a 'spiritual system' defined as and by "what goes on in your head," and so it might sound and feel better to a modern scientific materialist (or a neutral monist), to whom the concept of a God or gods is outlandish or even offensive and insane.